National Science Standards?

As anyone who follows what is going on nationally in language arts and math education can tell you, an effort known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative is working to craft common academic standards across states. Colorado has signed a memorandum of understanding to help develop these common standards, but has not necessarily agreed to adopt them. With what we have seen of the language arts and math standards so far, Colorado’s draft state standards revisions align fairly closely with the proposed common core.

Of course we already have National Science Standards. These were written by the National Resource Council and have been informing science education for a decade. In addition to the National Science Standards AAAS produced it own set of science standards with a series of publications such as, Benchmarks for Science Literacy and the Atlas for Science Literacy. So what’s new?

Recent research from the National Academies, in Taking Science to School and other publications, has criticized the current national science standards for not being specific enough to be a practical guide to teachers in the classroom. In response to this and based on a call from its members, NSTA launched the Science Anchors project, to create a more streamlined set of standards for science it called anchors. This effort has been in partnership with Achieve and they hoped to bring in NRC, and AAAS to the effort.

It was under this backdrop that the common core effort by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) came on the scene. Now leaders from NSTA, NRC, AAAS, and others are having discussions with the folks from NGA/CCSSO about science. The desire is to merge the anchors effort with the common core. But first the common core folks want to make sure they get math and language arts well under way before taking on other subject areas. Current estimates around a common core in science put any substantial product from this effort about two years out.